Life Is Strange – Episode 1 review: Awkward but promising

Life is Strange is a little wonky, but offers a unique gaming experience.

Photograph by: Square Enix
, Canada.com

Life Is Strange flew completely under my radar.

After playing most of Telltale’s adventure game series I’ve been feeling burnt out on the genre lately, but the internet furor surrounding Life is Strange caught my attention. Still, even after reading a few stories about the game, I didn’t completely know what to expect. The game is set in a high school and features a girl with time rewinding powers? Sounds weird – but that’s also why the game works so well.

While the Life is Strange’s first episode called Chrysalis, has awkward moments, particularly when it comes to writing, its inventive premise and interesting setting kept me playing through the Dontnod Entertainment’s Square Enix published title.

The game is set in an arts school called the Blackwell Academy, and follows Max Caulfield, a stereotypical”quirky” girl who has few friends and a healthy obsession with photography. Caulfield miraculously has the ability to rewind time, a power she discovers after witnessing a fatal incident involving an old friend, allowing the player to move through the game’s various sequences multiple times to uncover different outcomes.

The Walking Dead game and Telltale’s other series have branching story paths, but in order to play through each one you need to start over to view the different outcomes. Life is Strange does the same thing only you can rewind time instantly and view each branching story without playing through the entire episode again.

Essentially the player is given the opportunity to perform a “do over,” although every decision you make will reportedly also effect the outcome of the game’s story in later episodes. While not particularly inventive, the ability to instantly see how different decisions might change the outcome of a situation is a gratifying and compelling experience.

The title’s high school setting and teen-girl-with-super-powers story is hardly original, but its a story rarely explored in video games, and remains refreshing throughout Life Is Strange, despite a few bouts of painfully awkward dialogue and inconsistent voice acting quality.

Characters spout phrases filled with words like “hella” and other painful teenage jargon that feels outdated, making portions of the game’s dialogue feel laughably forced. The game’s writers are obviously adults desperately trying to write appropriate dialogue for Life is Strange’s teenage characters. While their efforts are commendable and Life is Strange’s dialogue – an important part of any adventure game – is mostly compelling, a few sections are just a little too much.

Ashley Burch (from popular internet video series “Hey Ash, Watcha Playin'”) voices Chloe, Caulfield’s long-lost, blue-haired, extremely angsty best friend, and is one of the game’s few standout supporting characters. However it’s important to point out Caulfield’s voice actor, Hannah Telle, is also great. In terms other issues, one thing that pulled me out of the experience is that character mouths are ridiculously out of sync with their words.

Even keeping in mind the fact that Life is Strange’s development studio is extremely small, the weird lip-syncing issues are inexcusable and pulled me out of the game’s world on a number of occasions. With that said, Life is Strange is also a great looking game and can at times be breathtaking, especially towards the end of the first episode. Characters have a unique art style that’s reminiscent of The Walking Dead game’s cartoony look, but with an added dash of realism.

Life is Strange works best when you’re exploring its high school setting, talking to students, and learning about their lives. Characters are the typical jocks, awkward art kids and the rich mean girl archetypes, but in the context of a video game, and the fact that I became personally invested in finding out more information about their back stories as well as their motivations and lives, kept me interested in learning more about Life is Strange’s surprisingly intricate world.

During my first play through of Chrysalis, I apparently missed a number of minor interactions, even though I scoured every area looking for objects and people to interact with. So it seems like the game needs a more obvious way to indicate to the player what they’re actually able to manipulate and change.

Overall, Life is Strange is promising despite its somewhat awkward dialogue and lip-syncing issues. It may follow the new-age adventure game mold set by Telltale Games a little too closely, but that’s okay – Telltale’s games are generally great for a reason. Why fix what isn’t broken?

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